The quality of real-time media events may be influenced by video latency between media capture, processing, transport and presentation, or end to end latency. While audio data handling may occur with minimal relative delay, video data handling may act as a bottleneck which limits the overall rate at which the event may occur (e.g., the audio/video data being presented in real-time) and impact the overall real-time conference experience. For example, video stream image latency issues may cause the image to jerk or give the video a rough or unsmooth quality, or make the audio appear out of synchronization with the video. Take for example a real-time video in which a participant is waving his/her hand. Inter-video frame latency may result in video display in which the subject's hand/arm may appear to jerk between discrete positions rather than making a smooth fluid motion. Additionally, when recombining audio and video data streams, the audio stream may be delayed in order to match the relatively larger delay for the video data. For example, a speaker's audio input is matched to the video so that movement of the speaker's lips matches the audio presentation.
Moreover, video processing may be central processing unit (CPU) intensive. For instance, increasing the video capture rate may consume CPU capacity and time. Even if the video capture rate is increased, communicating the increased video data may burden network resources.